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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (30 June) . . Page.. 1892 ..
MR CORBELL (continuing):
sporting facility in the ACT community. It is a significant facility which attracts over $2m a year in revenue to the ACT community and for at least six months now it has been closed. It has been unable to operate. The operators of the dragway are going broke because they have been unable to conduct events, but they still have all their bills to pay. They still have their loan requirements to meet, and they still have all the obligations to their creditors.
Mr Speaker, this is a disgraceful state of affairs. It is a disgraceful state of affairs because that facility should, this very day, be open and operating. One of the reasons why it is not open and it is not operating is that this Government, the current ACT Government, has not fulfilled its obligations to the dragway.
Canberra International Dragway attracts over 18,000 interstate visitors every year. Between November 1997 and September 1998 it attracted 43,420 people to its events in total. You can see from that figure that not only are there a significant number of interstate visitors coming to the ACT for dragway events but there are also a very large number of ACT residents who attend events, or attended events, at the facility.
Mr Berry: Now they have to do it on the streets.
MR CORBELL: Now, as my colleague Mr Berry points out, they have to do their sporting activities illegally, which I know most of them would not do because they are responsible individuals, and the investment they have made in their sport, legitimately, has been stopped. Why has it been stopped? It has been stopped because the ACT Government has not lived up to obligations under the lease arrangement that the dragway has. The Commonwealth also has to share some of the blame here, and I do not walk away from that for a moment, but my dispute, the Labor Opposition's dispute, is with the Government over its failure, because it has obligations too and it cannot, for all that it has said, walk away from those.
Those obligations primarily relate to conditions in the dragway's lease. That lease sets out what the ACT Government is required to do. The specific section of the lease that I want to refer to is clause 6(e) which reads:
That if at the expiration of this lease -
that is the dragway lease -
the Territory shall have decided not to sub-divide the land and that it is not required for any Territory or National Land purpose and shall have declared the premises to be available for lease AND if the Lessee has duly paid the rent and observed and performed the covenants and stipulations on the part of the Lessee to be observed and performed and giving the Territory not less than three months PREVIOUS notice in writing of his desire to extend the lease the Lessee shall be entitled to a further lease of the premises for a term of ten years and at such rents and subject to such conditions (including reappraisement of rents) as may then be determined by the Territory.
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